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IN ISTANBUL, one hot, sun-soaked day this past summer, the novelist Orhan Parmuk leaned back in his chair, a writerly throne in an overfull study, and looked out the window. He trained his eyes on the unblemished vista before him, where the Bosphorus, the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn run into one another and emerge as a perfect muddle of turquoise. Today, he announced, he was depressed. “I am a writer. I have books to write. What am I doing building a museum?” His voice rose in a crescendo to escape being drowned out by folkloric music coming from a passing cruise ship. A stuffed bird, perched to his left, peered down at the bookish debris below, giving the impression that the writer was addressing the handsome, ill-fated gull.
Scattered around the room was the raw material of the museum-to-be: salt shakers, porcelain figurines, irregularly shaped doorknobs, lottery tickets, a quince grinder. The words “never forget the objects as you write” were written in Turkish in capital letters across a little yellow Post-it. He looked stressed. He had lectures to deliver at Harvard in the fall. He hadn’t gotten far into his next novel. He had dreamed of taking a vacation with his new love, the novelist Kiran Desai. The music from the Love Boat got still louder. He winced.
The story of how a Nobel Prize-winning novelist would come to open a museum begins some 10 years ago in this city. Pamuk, who had not yet attained the renown that would come with his Borgesian novel “My Name Is Red,” was preoccupied by a love story taking shape in his head, the tale of a man — Kemal — who would come to suffer terrible heartbreak. Like Pamuk — who makes a handful of cameo appearances in his new novel, “The Museum of Innocence” — Kemal, the book’s dolorous hero, is the scion of a bourgeois Istanbul family. He falls for a poorer distant relation, a young, former beauty-pageant contestant named Fusun. From there, Pamuk guides us through a multi-decade tale of loss that is equally a quasi-anthropological portrait of obsession, class and, because the author is Orhan Pamuk, ideas about East and West. By the end of the novel, Kemal, who has been collecting objects linked to Fusun, will, with monastic dedication, erect a monument to her in the form of a Museum of Innocence.
And like Kemal, Pamuk will also open a museum of objects, filled with 83 displays for each of the 83 chapters of the novel. “As I wrote this novel over the past 10 years,” Pamuk told me, “I encountered everyday objects that would make their way into the story. At other times, the story would demand an object to keep it moving, so I would bring one in. When I am stuck, I cast about looking for ideas from objects around me. My perceptions, or you can say my tentacles, are wide open to everything in shop windows, in friends’ homes, in flea markets and antique shops and so on. This is how the Museum of Innocence came about.” The photos shown here are of some of those objects, with explanatory captions taken from interviews with the author.
When the museum opens next year, in a narrow 19th-century building, admission will be free with a ticket printed in the book. Each chapter, whether “An Anatomical Chart of Love Pains” or “My Father’s Death,” will inspire displays of ephemera. Among the objects: 4,213 cigarette butts, 237 hair barrettes, 419 national lottery tickets and 1 quince grinder.
As Pamuk guided me through the museum-to-be one afternoon, we climbed to the top floor and looked down at the rubble of construction. In the semidark, the mood was a bit like the architecture, pregnant with possibility. But would anyone ever come to his museum?
“My mother used to say no one would read my novels,” Pamuk told me. “My novel honors the museums that no one goes to, the ones in which you can hear your own footsteps.” Over the years, he visited hundreds of these queer, lesser-known monuments to collecting — from the ChineseTraditionalMedicineMuseum in Hangzhou, China, to the AvaGardnerMuseum in Smithfield, N.C.
His character Kemal visits museums, too — 5,723 of them, we learn from the novel. The similarities between Kemal and Orhan inspire a question that never fails to exasperate the author. He threw his voice, a complicated musical instrument, into the rhetorical query: “Mr. Pamuk, are you Kemal? Enough. No, I am not Kemal, but I cannot convince you that I am not Kemal. That is being a novelist.”
I scribbled the word “flustered” in my notebook. Suddenly he eased up. “I don’t want to give you the wrong idea,” he said. “I am happy. Tolstoy had his school. Another writer had his magazine, a third one had his movie dreams, and yet another one has his politics. This museum is my school, my magazine, my film, my politics. It is part of me.”
Negar Azimi is a senior editor at Bidoun, a cultural journal.
Orhan Pamuck favors short chapters that lead the reader from one entry to the next, turning back to correct or amend. He is directorial in “The Museum of Innocence,” his enchanting new novel of first love painfully sustained over a lifetime. In 83 chapters, a privileged Istanbul resident named Kemal tells of his obsession with Fusun, a beautiful shopgirl. The story of this ill-fated passion is preceded by a map of the city. Pamuk’s earlier readers may recall the broad sweep of the Bosporus, the mosques and market streets, the Pamuk Apartments in Nisantasi, from his historical and autobiographical book of wonders, “Istanbul: Memories and the City.” Kemal renders all views — the abandoned apartment of his transporting sexual encounters with Fusun, the years of twisting his life out of shape to honor his enduring passion. He writes from Istanbul, not America where he studied, not Paris where upper-crust Turks were acquiring their gloss of “free and modern.”
The city is on exhibit: the romantic touch of decaying wooden houses, the sturdy apartments of the nouveaux riches, postcard views of the shimmering Golden Horn, Soviet tankers on the Bosporus and a Frenchified restaurant once in favor. Kemal often reminds us that he writes from memory. The lovers meet in the Merhamet Apartments, in a flat abandoned by his mother. He dates his first clandestine meetings with Fusun to the spring of 1975. Or was it earlier, a family outing? (Fusun is a distant cousin.) He understands documentation as a serious pursuit in his life-absorbing love affair, “having become — with the passage of time — the anthropologist of my own experience.”
At that time Pamuk’s fledgling curator was to marry the lovely Sibel, a fashionable young woman with enlightened views, so enlightened she had gone the limit with Kemal. Virginity becomes a leitmotif — who will, who will not break the code of no sex before marriage, honored in Turkey back then. Kemal’s engaging memories largely scorn his social circle, though he notes that “two members of this large crowd took to politics in a serious way; one would be tortured by the police in the aftermath of the 1971 coup, and remain in prison until the 1974 amnesty; and it is likely that both of them dismissed the rest of us as ‘irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.’ ” Preparation for the engagement party looms for many chapters while Kemal’s enchantment with the beautiful Fusun blossoms. The shopgirl is 18 years old. Kemal is 30, and makes what he will of their passion — the novel we are reading. He begins to collect mementos of the affair: a hair clip, a cup Fusun touched, an earring. Much later, during their long (and explicitly unphysical) reconnection, he stows away Fusun’s cigarette stubs, a saltshaker from her dinner table, a quince grater from her kitchen. “Anyone remotely interested in the politics of civilization,” Kemal declares early on, in a mock scholarly discourse on collecting, “will be aware that museums are the repositories of those things from which Western civilization derives its wealth of knowledge, allowing it to rule the world, and likewise when the true collector, on whose efforts these museums depend, gathers together his first objects, he almost never asks himself what will be the ultimate fate of his hoard.”
When the engagement party finally arrives, a dressy affair for friends and extended family at the Istanbul Hilton, Fusun turns up as a guest — and so does Orhan Pamuk, who often plays a significant role in his own fiction. For once looking ahead, Kemal instructs the reader: “Those interested in Orhan Bey’s own description of how he felt while dancing with Fusun should look at the last chapter, entitled ‘Happiness.’ ” Pamuk has long been interested in doubles, in characters who reflect himself. In “The Museum of Innocence” he strikes this note again — and what’s more, Kemal strikes it too. “She resembled me,” he remarks of Fusun when he first encounters her selling rip-offs of Parisian fashion. And again: “Had I been a girl, had I been 12 years younger, this is what my body would be like.” Now, in telling their story, he must thoroughly possess her, become this shopgirl, as in Flaubert’s famous line — Madame Bovary, c’est moi. It’s the writer’s claim as an artist, not his understudy’s.
Part of the delight in “The Museum of Innocence” is in scouting out the serious games, yet giving oneself over to the charms of Pamuk’s storytelling. He often makes use of genre, turns the expected response to his purpose. His 1998 book “My Name Is Red” may be claimed as a historical novel with an embedded mystery, and yet again as a political story — the miniatures of Eastern book art headed toward obsolescence, facing off with Western art, its perspective and freedom of invention. Such worldly engagement is of no concern to Kemal: “I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent Communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the cold war.” It’s one of many denials that maintain his indifference to the political scene, and it’s in keeping with his character. A feckless soul, an aging bachelor living with his mother, he is dealt a position in a family business he barely attends to. Meanwhile, during the years of their separation, the beautiful Fusun has married a would-be movie director. Night after night Kemal joins them at her family’s dinner table, a threesome locked in a hopeless love story. It never occurs to the constant lover that Fusun may be ordinary — much like the adored girl in Nabokov’s “Lolita.” Kemal is chauffeured from his mother’s house in Nisantasi to Cukurcuma, passively watching the nightly news with Fusun’s family. Years flipping by, he tags along with the cinema crowd in Beyoglu, the beloved one aiming to be an actress. Kemal’s dogged endurance may try our patience, though his dead-end accounting provides a bleak comedy: “According to my notes, during the 409 weeks that my story will now describe, I went there for supper 1,593 times.” Maureen Freely’s translation captures the novelist’s playful performance as well as his serious collusion with Kemal. Her melding of tones follows Pamuk’s agility, to redirect our vision to the gravity of his tale: “This is not simply a story of lovers, but of the entire realm, that is, of Istanbul.”
There’s not much plot to “The Museum of Innocence”; and why should there be, if the artist is free? Still, Pamuk comes up with a cinematic ending, easy and swift as though churned out in a Turkish B-movie. But if, as Kemal recommends early in the novel, I turn to “Happiness,” the last chapter, I discover there how he sought out “the esteemed Orhan Pamuk, who has narrated the story in my name, and with my approval.” No trick, this is the writer’s claim to his workroom, where the gallery of his dreams displays not ephemera devoted to delusion but close attention to the “beauty of ordinary life” that has almost eluded Kemal. What’s on show in this museum is the responsibility to write free and modern. The real writer is never wholly innocent of searching out a word that, as Joseph Conrad put it in “Under Western Eyes,” “if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale.”
On the last page of “The Museum of Innocence,” Pamuk reveals the dates of composition: 2001-2, 2003-8. The hiatus may be explained by the fact that in 2003 he published “Istanbul,” an autobiography overlaid with the history of his city. It tells of his mother’s discarded apartment where, as a boy, he studied, painted, read and chose, perhaps in innocence, to make his way as a writer. There was a girl who posed for him in that studio, a model quite beautiful we may imagine, preserved in memory for this enchanting story.
Maureen Howard’s new book, “The Rags of Time,” will be published this month, completing her cycle of novels based on the four seasons.
Ayn Rand poses theatrically in her signature cape and gold dollar-sign pin on the cover of a groundbreaking new biography. Rand also poses theatrically in this same Halloween-ready costume (Rand impersonators have been known to wear it) on the cover of another groundbreaking new biography. The two books are being published a week apart. And both have gray covers that make them look even more interchangeable. Yet Rand, whose Objectivist philosophy is enjoying one of its periodic resurgences, loathed the very idea of grayness. She preferred dichotomies that were strictly black and white.
So in a Rand universe — like those of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” the doorstop treatise-style novels that have given her such staying power — it would be unacceptable that one of these books would be only moderately better than the other. And the versions of her story should not overlap as vastly as they do.
But both authors, Anne C. Heller (“Ayn Rand and the World She Made”) and Jennifer Burns (“Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right”) make many of the same points and touch on many of the same biographical details. That repetition is especially surprising since Ms. Burns had access to the supposedly crucial Ayn Rand Papers at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. Ms. Heller did not.
Still, Ms. Heller’s research is more intensive. It is so thorough, in fact, that it seems to inform Ms. Burns’s parallel but more cursory account of Rand’s personal life. (The Heller manuscript has been in circulation for long enough to be cited in one of Ms. Burns’s footnotes and included in her bibliography.) Ms. Heller has delivered a thoughtful, flesh-and-blood portrait of an extremely complicated and self-contradictory woman, coupling this character study with literary analysis and plumbing the quirkier depths of Rand’s prodigious imagination. Ms. Burns glosses through all this to arrive at her book’s best section, a lengthy coda about Rand’s intellectual and political legacies. Neither book is the work of a slavish Rand devotee.
Ms. Heller’s book is worth its $35 price, which is not the kind of detail that Rand herself would have been shy about trumpeting. When Russian Bolshevik soldiers commandeered and closed the St. Petersburg pharmacy run by Zinovy Rosenbaum, they made a lifelong capitalist of his 12-year-old daughter, Alissa, who would wind up fusing the subversive power of the Russian political novel with glittering Hollywood-fueled visions of the American dream.
While Ms. Heller sifts carefully through Rand’s early literary influences (very notably a French boys’ serial adventure story called “The Mysterious Valley,” whose dashing hero, according to Ms. Heller, greatly influenced Rand’s tastes in both real and fictitious men), Ms. Burns gets her out of Russia more hurriedly. Both books take her to California, and to the fishy story of how this young Russian ingénue, on only her second day in Hollywood, was plucked out of obscurity by Cecil B. DeMille, who cast her as an extra in “King of Kings.” Ms. Heller’s book does not let this fable go unquestioned. Ms. Burns doesn’t do more than replay it; her primary interests lie elsewhere.
So Ms. Heller provides the far more nuanced version of the strange dynamics between Rand and her husband, Frank O’Conner, whom she called “Cubbyhole.” (He gave her the unlikeliest imaginable nickname for such a steel-willed woman: “Fluff.”) Ms. Heller also provides a more evocative, detailed account of the long, duplicitous affair that Rand conducted with Nathaniel Branden, who began as a fan 25 years her junior and spent years as her foremost acolyte and officially anointed intellectual heir.
Both books characterize Rand’s long relationship with Branden as the most important connection in her life. And both use it to illustrate how drastically Rand’s personal ties could rupture. The amphetamine-addicted, self-styled goddess in both books becomes so moody and volatile that her associates do not simply part ways with her. Some, like Branden and his wife, Barbara, wind up excommunicated. When Rand died, Heller reports, there were bodyguards at her funeral to keep the Brandens away if they tried to attend. Ms. Burns ignores that detail, preferring to cite the dollar-sign-shaped topiary that was part of the funeral décor.
Crucially, both authors understand the reasons that Rand’s popularity has endured, not only among college students dazzled (and thronged into packs) by her triumphant individualism but also by entrepreneurs. From the young Ted Turner. who rented billboards to promote the “Who is John Galt?” slogan from “Atlas Shrugged,” to the founders of Ctaiglist and Wikipedia, who have found self-contradictory new ways to mix populism with individual enterprise, it is clear that (in Ms. Burns’s words) “reports of Ayn Rand’s death are greatly exaggerated.”
Ms. Burns gives a lucid account of how Rand set herself at odds with religious conservatism, how Rand-inspired libertarianism has shape-shifted, and even how Rand disciples of the 1970s adopted a hippie aspect to rival that of Students for a Democratic Society, confounding everyone, Rand included. She referred to libertarian fans as “scum,” “intellectual cranks” and “plagiarists.” Rand also complained, “If such hippies hope to make me their Marcuse, it will not work.”
That era was one Rand moment. This seems to be another. Both of these books cast light on why Rand’s popularity can be rekindled by economic turmoil, and on how much her real life and reputation diverged. Both capture the temperament of a woman once described as “the Even Knievel of leaping to conclusions.” But of these two authors, it is Ms. Heller who comes closer to conveying what is missing from most images of Rand: “a personal warmth and charm that Rand most assuredly possessed,” on the evidence of her hypnotic effect on those in her orbit. Rand might have expressed disdain for that charisma, but it was enough to stop DeMille in his tracks. She would have been nowhere without it.
Capote's "A Christmas Memory" takes place in the South during the Depression. Though a larger historical framework is not apparent in the story, the traditions of the era are well represented by Buddy's adventures with his cousin. Living in a house with many relatives was common in times of great poverty, and Buddy was most likely there because his parents' economic situation prevented them from providing him with a stable life. In addition, the activities he pursues with his cousin—baking fruitcakes, cutting down a tree in the woods, making homemade decorations and Christmas presents together—not only evoke a nostalgia for a simpler time but also represent common amusements in a rural community when money was scarce. One of Buddy's favorite pastimes is going to the movies, which costs only a dime. During the Depression, millions attended the country's elaborate movie palaces every week; it was the cheapest, most common form of entertainment in a world not yet captivated by radio and television. That Buddy's cousin has never been to a movie herself may not seem so strange when one considers that she grew up in an era before the film industry had captured the public's attention.
An Intolerant Era
Less apparent in the writing of "A Christmas Memory" are the cultural attitudes that fostered what Thomas Dukes has called "the quintessential homosexual writing style1' of the 1950s. In an era of considerable sexual repression, addressing homosexual themes overtly in literature was uncommon. Instead, authors, especially Capote, created situations in a type of "code" that were often interpreted in a homosexual context. One aspect of this "code" in Capote's story is the sensitivity of the central male character, particularly his preference for emphasizing his feelings and emotions over action. Another aspect of this "code" is the emphasis on female characters and domestic concerns. Note also the joke that Mr. Haha Jones makes when he asks Buddy and his cousin, "Which of you is a drinking man?" That Haha finds this funny suggests that he equates Buddy's gender identity more with his female friend rather than with his status as a young male. Outside of his writing, Capote defined himself as homosexual in the often homophobic culture of the 1950s and 1960s through the way in which he chose to be photographed and the effeminate manner he assumed during television interviews.
--> A mirror of the story
The story’ narrator, (in this case, is the author, Truman Capote) tells to the reader to "imagine a morning in late November" more than twenty years ago. The scenary is a kitchen of a rambling house in a small rural town in the 1930s. An elderly woman stands at the kitchen window and says "it's fruitcake weather!". This is delightful news to her seven-year-old cousin and best friend, Buddy. "Fruitcake weather" signals the beginning of the holiday season for the unconventional cousins, who bake the loaves for the people in their lives who have been kind to them through the years. The two proceed with their tradition more or less oblivious to the other relatives who live in the house: "they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, [but] we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them."
They begin the routine by gathering pecans for the fruitcakes. The unnamed (Sook Faulk) woman and the little boy (“Buddy”, Capote), accompanied by their dog Queenie, spend three hours filling an old baby carriage with the nuts that have fallen on the ground in the neighbor's orchard. Then they return to the kitchen to shell the nuts by firelight and plan the next day's work— buying the other ingredients for the fruitcakes. Later, they go up to the woman's bedroom, where she keeps a change purse hidden under her bed. The purse is filled with the money they have accumulated all year from their various enterprises: selling fruit and flowers, and once even charging neighbors to see a deformed chicken. At this time the narrator, grown now and relating the story in flashback, reveals more facts about his cousin. She has never seen a movie or eaten in a restaurant, but she knows how to tame hummingbirds, tell chilling ghost stories, and create elixirs to cure a variety of ills.
The next day, they go on their shopping trip. During their most unusual errand they visit a man named Haha Jones, the local whiskey bootlegger. Jones is large and frightening-looking, but he is kind to the cousins, giving them a bottle of whiskey in exchange for the promise of a fruitcake. Over the next four days they bake thirty-one cakes, most of which they send to people they know only slightly or not at all; people who have passed through their town once, or famous people such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The woman, the narrator points out, “she is shy with everyone except strangers." After the cakes are baked and sent, they split the leftover whiskey and give a spoonful to the dog. A little drunk, they sing and dance around the kitchen, but soon two relatives come in and scold the woman for giving whiskey to the boy. Sobbing, she retreats to her room. Buddy comforts her by reminding her that they will cut down a Christmas tree the next day.
In the morning, they find the perfect Christmas tree, twice as tall as Buddy. They drag it home themselves along with other holiday greenery. They make decorations from colored paper and tinfoil to supplement the few store-bought ornaments they own and sprinkle the tree with shredded cotton. They finish their decorating tasks by creating holly wreaths for the house's front windows. Gifts are created for the rest of the family; Buddy makes his cousin a kite, and he suspects she is making him one as well. His suspicions are confirmed on Christmas Eve when they are too excited to sleep and they reveal their presents to one another. After they open their presents on Christmas Day, they go out to fly the kites. They have such a good time that the old woman feels as if she has seen God.
The narrator reveals that this is the last Christmas he shared with his cousin. Buddy is sent to military school, and spends his summers at camp. For a while, his cousin writes him and continues her holiday fruitcake tradition, sending him "the best of the batch." Eventually, though, she becomes mentally and physically frail, unable to keep up her routine. When she dies, Buddy knows before he is told: "A message saying so merely confirms a piece of news some secret vein had already received." The story closes with him walking over the grounds of his school and looking at the sky: "As if I expected to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."
Comments about the story
Truman Capote learns the true meaning of the Christmas season through his older cousin. He remembers times full of happiness, simple pleasures, and giving - despite how poor he was. His story takes the reader down Memory Lane to show how his cousin touched his life.
Truman remembers the friendship he had with his older distant cousin. The 60-year-old homely dressed old woman considers 7-year-old Truman her best friend. They spend time with each other because relatives ignore them and they have no other friends. The woman had a childhood best friend named Buddy, but he died long ago. She does not call Truman by his real name but by the name Buddy. The old woman doesn't get out much, cares nothing for her appearance, and lives by the bible she reads. She has the courage to kill snakes and also dips snuff secretly. Winter is an exciting time for both of them. At the beginning of the season the woman declares it is "fruitcake weather."
They take great care in gathering the ingredients to make the 30 fruitcakes they bake every year. First they pick pecans from trees in another person's yard with their rat terrier, Queenie. Next they must count how much money they have saved in their Fruitcake Fund to buy cake ingredients. Truman reflects on all of the ways they have raised money in past years. The pair enters every contest they hear about. They have won $5 in a contest, sold jellies and jams, picked flowers for funerals, and produced their own show called Fun and Freak. The show featured pictures of various cities and a three-legged chicken. They even killed flies for money from relatives. Relatives paid them a penny for every 25 flies they killed. In the woman's room they carefully count how much money they have in the fund. Truman thinks they have $13 saved, so they throw a penny out. The woman is superstitious, stays in bed on the 13th of every month, and thinks it bad luck if they have exactly $13.
The next morning the woman and Truman go to buy the cherries, pineapples, raisins, walnuts, and other ingredients. They also pay a visit to Mr. Haha Jones to buy the whiskey necessary for the fruitcakes. Buying alcohol is illegal where they live. The woman says the fruitcakes must have whiskey, so she buys some anyway. She takes Truman to the fish fry and dancing cafy that Mr. Haha owns. It is public knowledge that people have been murdered and cut up in Mr. Haha's cafy. Neither of them has met Mr. Haha. In the past they bought their whiskey from his wife. Truman and the woman are taken back when they see Mr. Haha's tall figure, scarred face, and cold demeanor. When the woman tells him she needs whiskey for her fruitcakes, he gives her the bottle for free and asks for only a fruitcake in return.
Truman and the woman make 31 cakes in four days. They send the cakes out to many people they don't know or have met one time and only a few neighbor friends. Every year they send a fruit cake to the president of the United States, which is Roosevelt at the time, and Baptist missionaries. They also sends fruitcakes to random people, like the truck driver that waves at them when he passes through and the couple that talked to them after their car broke down in front of the house. Truman comments that the woman is "shy around everyone but strangers." After mailing off the last cakes, Truman is exhausted and sad because they are broke again. The woman does not share his sadness. She wants to celebrate that they sent out all the cakes by drinking leftover whiskey.
Truman, the woman and Queenie drink the leftover whiskey. The pair sing and dance. Truman feels better after drinking the whiskey and dancing. He wants to be a tap dancer when he is older. Two relatives walk in on their celebration and yell at the woman. How could she let 7-year-old Truman drink whiskey? They bring up cousins and uncles who were involved in scandals and humiliated the family. The woman runs to her room and cries.
The woman continues to cry all night. Truman cheers her up when he reminds her that they have to go pick a Christmas tree the next day. The woman stops crying and says she know the perfect place to find a tree. Her father use to take her there when she was young. The next day they drive, wade through water and brush, and pick a very tall tree. On the way home the mill owner's wife offers to pay the woman a small price for the tree. The woman is usually soft spoken but manages to firmly tell the lady that her tree is worth more. The mill owner's wife laughs at her, but the woman tells her there is not another tree like hers. She is not willing to sell it.
By Christmas Eve the woman and Truman are broke. Truman draws paper ornaments. The woman cuts them out and hangs them on the tree. Once they finish decorating, the woman declares it is the most beautiful tree. They make presents for everyone. Women relatives get color scarves. Male relatives get syrup that can be used to clear a cough or heal ailments after hunting. Although they would love to get each other elaborate gifts, Truman and the woman secretly make kites to give each other for Christmas. For the past two years they have given each other kites, so it isn't a huge surprise. The woman is a little hurt at only being able to get Truman a kite.
Christmas morning the pair suffers through a huge breakfast with relatives. Both the woman and Truman are more excited about opening presents. Truman is angry when he sees his gifts from his family. He gets hand-me-downs, a church shirt, and a subscription to a religious magazine. The woman gets a few gifts. Truman and the woman go out to fly their kites. Truman forgets about how much he hates his other presents when he flies his kite. The woman has a revelation when she flies hers. She tells Truman that all her life she thought she would see the Lord when she was sick and dying. Flying the kite has made her realize that she already sees the Lord and his handiwork in the simple things.
Relatives send Truman off to military school. Truman and the woman miss each other. The woman sends him money for picture shows and asks him to write. She even sends him fruitcakes. Truman is never able to visit. One day the woman tells Truman that Queenie died. She was kicked hard by a horse. Eventually the woman begins to sleep more days than the 13th away. When Truman does not hear the woman's annual declaration at wintertime that it is "fruitcake weather," he knows something is terribly wrong. Now, 20 years later, Truman walks along the streets on his college campus during wintertime. He looks to the sky and remembers their two kites flying in the wind.
Analysing the story
It is odd that a 60-year-old and a 7-year-old share a friendship. They build a friendship based on the rejection they experience in life. Both are considered outsiders by family and other people. In a season that should be about spending time with family, they have n
o relationship with their family. Both are poor and don't have much. Although they live poor lives, they seem to be content. When they need money, they come up with creative ways to earn it, rather than complain about their situation. Since they make fruitcakes every year, their creative ideas work.
The description of the woman and her habits symbolizes her character. The woman is not materialistic. She is very religious and, although it may not look like it, she has strength. She is courageous enough to kill snakes, which is an animal many people fear. The woman may even still wish to be young. She has not gotten over the death of her friend because she continues to call Truman by the name of her friend, Buddy.
The woman's phrase "fruitcake weather" could mean that winter is the season for giving. After taking much care and putting in many hours to make the fruitcakes, the two give the fruitcakes away to strangers. Those who have been kind to them in even the smallest gesture of a wave get a fruitcake. Some of the people they send cakes to are often the people overlooked in society, like the bus driver and the knife grinder. Meeting with Mr. Haha shows that people cannot be judged on their appearance. Although Mr. Haha looked scary and owned a scary cafy in a dangerous part of town, he was still nice enough to give the woman good whiskey she needed for free.
The woman views Truman too highly. They are friends, but she finds it okay to take him with her when she buys whiskey and give him whiskey to drink. Giving a 7-year-old illegal alcohol is very irresponsible. Truman may be right when he says in the first part of the story that the woman is still a child. The two relatives who yell at her treat her like a child and compare her to other humiliating relatives. The woman's character is strong with morals and purity. She gives freely. She even celebrates giving when it has left her broke. The woman is happy with the rituals that come around Christmas time. Because Christmas time is usually thought of as a period of giving, the woman is genuine in her efforts. The woman's quiet strength also comes through. Although she is shy, she is strong when she needs to be.
Truman and the woman show that people don't need money to have a good Christmas. The gifts they give each other and family are heartfelt because they spent time making them. The gifts they receive from their relatives imply that the relatives don't care about them. Although Truman and the woman would like other things, they are happy with the kites they get from each other. The woman's excitement to open gifts shows how childlike she really acts. The woman realizes that simple pleasures can be a blessing. With not having much, she is able to see the Lord in her life more than she would have if she had money.
Queenie's death symbolizes the weak bond between the woman and Truman when he goes to school. Queenie was with them through everything. Her death symbolizes the fact that one day Truman and the woman will do nothing together again. The fact that the woman got to the point where she did not celebrate "fruitcake weather" reveals that she has died. Her excitement about winter coming had to do with spending the holidays with Truman. Truman's not being able to come home and Queenie's death was too much for her. Truman's memory of the woman, who has no name in the story, shows that he cared deeply for her. He thinks of the kites almost as their two souls flying freely in the wind. The kites could symbolize the freedom Truman and the woman have experienced all their lives. They are not confined to society or its rules. They pleased themselves, gave freely, and experienced more happiness with themselves.
Characters
Buddy
Reading the story of A Christmas Memory we perceive that the narrator refers to himself only in the first person (I, me, myself), but his friend calls him Buddy "in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend" and who had died when she was a child. Truman Capote said that Buddy is based on himself; as a boy, Capote indeed lived with an elderly, somewhat eccentric cousin in a country house full of relatives. At the time the story takes place Buddy is seven years old, and his age influences the way he perceives the events going on around him. Buddy is present in all adventurs and works in the life of his friend, his cousin, "She is still a child”. Every Saturday she gives him a dime and he goes to the movies, which influences his decision to be a tap dancer when he grows up. Because his friend never goes to movies, Buddy tells her about them, thus honing his storytelling skills. Later, when he recounts mat he has been sent to military school, the sensitive narrator breaks the nostalgic mood of the story and provides its bittersweet resolution: "home is where my friend is, and there I never go."
Mr. Haha Jones
Described as a "giant with razor scars across his cheeks," Haha Jones is proprietor of a "sinful" fish-fry and dancing cafe. The name "Haha" is man who never smiles. Buddy and his friend purchase whiskey for their fruitcakes from Haha, and when he gives them their money back he demonstrates that there is good in all people.
My friend
Although she remains unnamed throughout the story, this "sixty-something" distant cousin is the best friend of narrator. Capote said in interviews that he based this character on Miss Sook Faulk, an elderly cousin with whom he spent much of his childhood. Buddy's friend is described as "still a child," and it is her innocence which allows their friendship to occur. The narrator reveals her to be a very idiosyncratic person - one who possesses unusual characteristics - by stating the things she has never done: "eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except the funny papers and the Bible." She is also very wise, however, and it is she who teaches Buddy to value each individual object because "there are never two of anything." She also helps Buddy to appreciate nature as the place where God reveals Himself every day.
Queenie
Queenie is a dog, described as a "tough little orange and white rat terrier who has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites." Her resilience symbolizes the mam characters' friendship, for though each is small and physically insignificant, their spirits are united by a strong bond. Queenie's death symbolizes the friends' forced separation and foreshadows the eventual death of the narrator's friend.
Two Relatives
Buddy never refers to the other people who live with him and his friend by name, and by doing so he demonstrates his emotional distance from them. The irony in the term "Those Who Know Best" signifies that he believes they really do not know what is best for him. The relatives are shown to be harsh and scolding. He admits that "they have power over us, and frequently make us cry." Buddy also does not think much of their pious religious attitudes. When he receives a subscription to a religious magazine for children as a Christmas present, he says, "It makes me boil. It really does."
Themes
"A Christmas Memory" is an evocation of an idealized early childhood, a memory clouded by the innocence of a seven-year-old. The narrator, who is now an adult, remembers making fruitcakes with his elderly cousin, an annual event which marked the coming of Christmas.
Memory and Reminiscence
From the beginning of the story, the narrator's memory is linked to the act of storytelling and creativity. "Imagine a morning in late November. A coming of winter morning more than twenty years ago." Though the narrator sets the scene, he depends on the reader's own experiences to bring it into focus so he can tell the story. This technique plays upon the questionable nature of memory, in which personal experience is combined with images from other stones, books, and pictures to form a mind's-eye view. Thus, the veracity, or truthfulness, of memory is cast into doubt.
The story also illustrates the power of specific objects to evoke a particular memory. Just as in the beginning of the story "a great black stove" is the object around which the remembered kitchen is constructed, so at the end does the image of kites help the narrator to remember his cousin and their friendship. Likewise, the "hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies" which comprises the bulk of the two friends' fortune recalls "the carnage of August" when they were paid one penny for every twenty-five flies they killed. This image exemplifies the nature of memory in which one sense (in this case the smell of the pennies) leads to the remembrance of another sensory experience (the sight of the dead flies).
Another trait of personal reminiscence is the listing of objects, such as what the narrator eats for dinner ("cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam"), the fruitcake ingredients ("Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple," etc.) and the Christmas tree decoration ("a shoe box of ermine tails..., coils of frazzled tinsel ..., one silver star," etc.). These lists not only aid the reader in conjuring an image of the scene being described, they also establish the authority of the narrator, as though he were saying, "I can prove that I was there because this is what I saw."
Memory also acts as a retreat from reality, as evidenced by the narrator's elderly friend calling him Buddy "in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend" and who died. Her later inability to distinguish him from "the other Buddy" signals the increasing confusion of her mind and also her death, when she herself becomes a memory of the narrator.
Friendship
Friendship among social outcasts is a common theme in Capote's work, and in "A Christmas Memory" the friendship between Buddy and his friend provide strength for the narrator. Buddy and his friend are outsiders within their household; the other members of the family "have power over [them], and frequently make [them] cry," but on the whole they "are not too much aware of them" because the friendship is then- refuge. This friendship is made possible because even though his cousin is "sixty-something," she is "still a child" and shares his innocent view of the world. The strength of their friendship is further underscored by the statement that the narrator's real name is not Buddy; it is the name his friend has given him, and it is the only name the reader learns. From his cousin, Buddy learns how the beauty of nature signifies God's presence and that money is not the only measure of value. When the "rich mill owner's lazy wife" tries to buy their Christmas tree, his friend exclaims "We wouldn't take a dollar," underscoring the intrinsic value of nature by stating: "There's never two of anything." The friendship helps the narrator survive once he is separated from her, though he recognizes the irreversible loss of his childhood innocence: "Home is where my friend is, and there I never go." Even twenty years later, he reminds and keeps with tenderness preserving their friendship to a "lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."
Coming of Age
"A Christmas Memory" shows how children pass into adulthood not only by growing older, but also by learning the ways of the world. Two conflicting worldviews confront Buddy in the story, and it is his ability to synthesize the two that leads to his increased wisdom. His friend's childlike qualities exemplify her refusal to leave childhood and assume an adult role. The narrator states: "She is still a child." Though seven-year-old Buddy respects this quality, it is the basis for her ostracism from the rest of the family, who treat her as a subordinate. Her inability or refusal to properly distinguish between what is socially acceptable behavior and what is not is demonstrated in her allowing Buddy to become drunk on the leftover whiskey. She does understand that society might have good reason for refusing to allow children to drink alcohol. Told in flashback, the narrator relates the bittersweet nature of coming of age. Once removed from his best friend and sent to military school, he states that "Home is where my friend is, and there I never go." He recognizes the symbolic innocence of his younger days when he "[expects] to see, rather like hearts, a lost pair of kites hurrying toward heaven."
Style
"A Christmas Memory" is a personal reminiscence which depends on first-person narration and the nostalgia of a rural Southern setting to evoke its mood. Its realism is supported by its straightforward, linear structure, while its use of lyrical language evokes the idea of a mythical past.
Point of View
The story employs a first-person narrator who is called Buddy, though we are also told that this is not his real name, but a name given to him by his friend. By telling us this, the narrator suggests that the story is not his alone, but also belongs to his friend, the other major character in the story. The advantage of the first-person point of view lies in its allowing us to experience the story as Buddy himself did. The description of Mr. Haha is not an objective view; rather it is the view of a seven-year-old boy: "he is a giant; he does have scars; he doesn't smile." The italicized words demonstrate the amazement and fear felt by seven-year-old Buddy. Likewise, what the narrator thinks of the others in the household comes through in his references to them. "Other people inhabit the house," and his emotional distance is underscored by his using the generic term "people" and his refusal to give them personalities. His later reference to "those who Know Best" suggests his belief that they really do not know best. The fact that the narrator is an adult while he is telling the story is also significant, because it allows him to put his earlier memories into perspective and to understand events in ways which a seven-year-old boy could not: The adult narrator recognizes that his friend was "still a child." The main disadvantage of first-person narration is its limited ability to portray others. The reader must rely on Buddy's description of the woman, since her thoughts are never shown. Likewise, the reader cannot form valid judgments about the other family members because the point of view does not allow their perspective to be heard.
Scenary
"A Christmas Memory" is set in the rural South during the early 1930s. This can be deduced from the fact that the story first appeared in 1956, and the narrator tells us it took place during the winter "more than twenty years ago." This places the story during the Great Depression, a time of great poverty, which may explain why so many relatives reminiscence.
Structure
Partly because "A Christmas Memory" is a reminiscence, time is its dominant structural element. There are two time periods in the story: the present, in which the narrator relates the story, and the distant past, when the narrator was a boy. The narrator quickly moves the reader into the distant past by issuing a series of commands: "Imagine a morning in late November... .Consider the kitchen of a spreading old house." At the climax of the story, as Buddy and his cousin fly kites on Christmas day, die narrator brings the reader back to the present: "This is our last Christmas together." This sudden shift in time abruptly ends the story's nostalgic mood, and in the several subsequent paragraphs that recount events leading up to the narrator's present life, Capote quickly establishes a tone of bittersweet melancholy. By placing the main action of the story nearly twenty years before, that time is made to seem distant and remote. That Buddy's cousin is no longer living by the end of the story further serves to emphasize the passing of time and the inability for people to return to the past.
--> Critical Overview
A Christmas Memory is text full in emotion, sensibility, aesthetic beauty, produced in fine trace and sweet reminds. Everybody, each one of us, has your own A Christmas Memory. This is a wonderful work! The best text that I have read in the last times. And, by this reason, is the subject of my monograph.
A Christmas Memory was first published in Mademoiselle in 1956 and then reprinted in Selected Writings of Truman Capote in 1963, but it received little attention until it was reprinted as a gift-boxed set for Christmas in 1966. Reviews at the time were generally favorable, with a writer for Harper's calling it "an enchanting little book destined ... to become a classic." Nancy McKenzie noted in The New York Times that the story "seesaws slowly and nostalgically in time." However, other critics, including playwright Tennessee Williams, characterized the story as saccharine, overly sentimental, or even repulsive. Capote himself described the story as a catharsis which helped him to deal with his experiences as a child in the South: "The moment I wrote that short story I knew I would never write another word about the South. I am not going to be haunted by it any more, so I see no reason to deal with those people or those settings," he said in an interview with Roy Newquist in Counterpoint in 1964. About A Christmas Memory, the Saturday Review called it as “one of the most moving stories in the language”.
William Nance sees the story in The Worlds of Truman Capote as important for understanding Capote's work because of the character of Buddy's elderly friend. "Asexual admiration of a childlike dreamer heroine is the usual attitude of the Capote narrator," Nance explains, linking Buddy's friend to Dolly Talbo in The Grass Harp and Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. Nance further notes that in "A Christmas Memory" Capote displays his typical "hostility toward those outside the magic circle," the magic circle being the closed environment manufactured by those who are alienated in some way from society.
Many critics have noted the similarity between Buddy himself and Capote's other male characters. Often lonely, thirsting for love, and in search of an identity, these characters represent Capote himself. In "A Christmas Memory," these emotional quests end on a sad note when the narrator says "Home is where my friend is, and there I never go." Other critics comment on Capote's presentation of male characters as forcing the reader to rethink gender roles. Buddy revises the traditional coming-of-age narrative, in which the male protagonist demonstrates his masculinity and self-worth by moving ever westward and exploring new frontiers. Instead, Buddy remembers with fondness baking fruitcakes on a cast-iron stove, thereby romanticizing the traditionally female sphere of domesticity. During the years in which he is supposed to "come of age," he rejects the traditionally masculinizing influence of military schools, which he characterizes as "a miserable succession of bugle-blowing prisons."
--> About A Christmas Memory, DANIEL MENDELSOHN wrote for The New York Times (www.nytimes.com), on December 5, 2004 the following words:
"Winter Woods
Morning. Frozen rime lusters the grass; the sun, round as an orange and orange as hot-weather moons, balances on the horizon, burnishes the silvered winter woods. A wild turkey calls. A renegade hog grunts in the undergrowth. Soon, by the edge of knee-deep, rapid-running water, we have to abandon the buggy. Queenie wades the stream first, paddles across barking complaints at the swiftness of the current, the pneumonia-making coldness of it. We follow, holding our shoes and equipment (a hatchet, a burlap sack) above our heads. A mile more: of chastising thorns, burs and briers that catch at our clothes; of rusty pine needles brilliant with gaudy fungus and molted feathers. Here, there, a flash, a flutter, an ecstasy of shrillings remind us that not all the birds have flown south. Always, the path unwinds through lemony sun pools and pitch vine tunnels. Another creek to cross: a disturbed armada of speckled trout froths the water round us, and frogs the size of plates practice belly flops; beaver workmen are building a dam. On the farther shore, Queenie shakes herself and trembles. My friend shivers, too: not with cold but enthusiasm. One of her hat's ragged roses sheds a petal as she lifts her head and inhales the pine-heavy air. ''We're almost there; can you smell it, Buddy?'' she says, as though we were approaching an ocean.
And, indeed, it is a kind of ocean. Scented acres of holiday trees, prickly-leafed holly. Red berries shiny as Chinese bells: black crows swoop upon them screaming. Having stuffed our burlap sacks with enough greenery and crimson to garland a dozen windows, we set about choosing a tree".
-->
Media Adaptations
"A Christmas Memory" was adapted for television in 1967 with Geraldine Page and Donnie Melvin; Truman Capote was the narrator. It is available on video under such titles as ABC Playhouse 67; A Christmas Memory or Truman Capote's "A Christmas Memory"; the latter version was also released by Allied Artists in 1969 as part of Truman Capote's Trilogy.
The story has been adapted as part of Short Story Anthology, a sixteen-part series available from Children's Television International; "A Christmas Memory" comprises episodes 11 and 12 of the series.
An audio adaptation of the story read by Capote is available from Knopf Book & Cassette Classics; a version read by Celeste Holm which includes "The Thanksgiving Visitor" is available from Random House Audiobooks.
Holiday Memories is a musical stageplay adaptation by Malcolm Ruhl and Russell Vandenbroucke combining both "A Christmas Memory" and "The Thanksgiving Visitor"; it was published by Berwyn Press in 1991. And finally about A Christmas Memory, here we have some editorial reviews:
Amazon.com Review
A Christmas Memory is the classic memoir of Truman Capote's childhood in rural Alabama. Until he was ten years old, Capote lived with distant relatives. This book is an autobiographical story of those years and his frank and fond memories of one of his cousins, Miss Sook Faulk. The text is illustrated with full color illustrations that add greatly to the story without distracting from Capote's poignant prose.
From School Library Journal
Grade 3 Up-- This tiny gem of a holiday story, although a memory, is told in the present tense, which gives it a certain immediacy. Written by Capote as if a backward glance at his childhood while in college, the story traces a month of pre-Christmas doings in his parentless, poor household. The seven-year-old and his "friend," a distant, eccentric, and in those times elderly (mid-sixties), cousin prepare several dozen fruitcakes and mail them to people they admire. Gathering the pecans from those left behind in the harvest, buying illegally made whiskey for soaking the cakes, getting a little tipsy on the leftovers, cutting their own tree, and decorating it with homemade ornaments are some of the adventures the two share. The outside world barely intrudes on this portrayal of a loving friendship which wraps readers in coziness like the worn scrap quilt warms the old woman. Reminiscent of Lisbeth Zwerger, Peck's watercolor-and-ink full-page illustrations greatly enhance the text. Her use of lighter shades, tawny colors, and fine lines plus a background wash which suggests rather than delineates detail is perfect for this holiday memory of Christmas celebrated in rural Alabama in the early 1930s. --Susan Hepler, Arlington Public Library, VA
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
It begins in "fruitcake weather" ... ends with Christmas day. The classic American story has been delicately illustrated. --The New York Times Book Review--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
First published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Truman Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic. We are proud to be reprinting this warm and delicately illustrated edition of A Christmas Memory--"a tiny gem of a holiday story" (School Library Journal, starred review). Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship between two innocent souls--one young and one old--and the memories they share of beloved holiday rituals.
From the Hardcover edition.
From the Inside Flap
First published in 1956, this much sought-after autobiographical recollection of Truman Capote's rural Alabama boyhood has become a modern-day classic. We are proud to be reprinting this warm and delicately illustrated edition of A Christmas Memory--"a tiny gem of a holiday story" (School Library Journal, starred review). Seven-year-old Buddy inaugurates the Christmas season by crying out to his cousin, Miss Sook Falk: "It's fruitcake weather!" Thus begins an unforgettable portrait of an odd but enduring friendship between two innocent souls--one young and one old--and the memories they share of beloved holiday rituals.
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Truman Capote (1924-1984). Based on his own boyhood in rural Alabama in the 1930s, A Christmas Memory was orginally published in Mademoiselle in 1956 and later was included in Breakfast at Tiffany's.
A woman with shorn white hair is standing at the kitchen window. She is wearing tennis shoes and a shapeless gray sweater over a summery calico dress. She is small and sprightly, like a bantam hen; but, due to a long youthful illness, her shoulders are pitifully hunched. Her face is remarkable-not unlike Lincoln's, craggy like that, and tinted by sun and wind; but it is delicate too, finely boned, and her eyes are sherry-colored and timid. "Oh my," she exclaims, her breath smoking the windowpane, "It's fruitcake weather!"
The person to whom she is speaking is myself. I am seven; she is sixty-something. We are cousins, very distant ones, and we have lived together--well, as long as I can remember. Other people inhabit the house, relatives; and though they have power over us, and frequently make us cry, we are not, on the whole, too much aware of them. We are each other's best friend. She calls me Buddy, in memory of a boy who was formerly her best friend. The other Buddy died in the 1880's, when she was still a child. She is still a child.
"I knew it before I got out of bed," she says, turning away from the window with a purposeful excitement in her eyes. "The courthouse bell sounded so cold and clear. And there were no birds singing; they've gone to warmer country, yes indeed. Oh, Buddy, stop stuffing biscuit and fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat. We've thirty cakes to bake."
It's always the same: a morning arrives in November, and my friend, as though officially inaugurating the Christmas time of year that exhilarates her imagination and fuels the blaze of her heart, announces: "It's fruitcake weather! Fetch our buggy. Help me find my hat."
The hat is found, a straw cartwheel corsaged with velvet roses out-of-doors has faded: it once belonged to a more fashionable relative. Together, we guide our buggy, a dilapidated baby carriage, out to the garden and into a grove of pecan trees. The buggy is mine; that is, it was bought for me when I was born. It is made of wicker, rather unraveled, and the wheels wobble like a drunkard's legs. But it is a faithful object; springtimes, we take it to the woods and fill it with flowers, herbs, wild fern for our porch pots; in the summer, we pile it with picnic paraphernalia and sugar-cane fishing poles and roll it down to the edge of a creek; it has its winter uses, too: as a truck for hauling firewood from the yard to the kitchen, as a warm bed for Queenie, our tough little orange and white rat terrier who has survived distemper and two rattlesnake bites. Queenie is trotting beside it now.
Three hours later we are back in the kitchen hulling a heaping buggyload of windfall pecans. Our backs hurt from gathering them: how hard they were to find (the main crop having been shaken off the trees and sold by the orchard's owners, who are not us) among the concealing leaves, the frosted, deceiving grass. Caarackle! A cheery crunch, scraps of miniature thunder sound as the shells collapse and the golden mound of sweet oily ivory meat mounts in the milkglass bowl. Queenie begs to taste, and now and again my friend sneaks her a mite, though insisting we deprive ourselves. "We mustn't, Buddy. If we start, we won't stop. And there's scarcely enough as there is. For thirty cakes." The kitchen is growing dark. Dusk turns the window into a mirror: our reflections mingle with the rising moon as we work by the fireside in the firelight. At last, when the moon is quite high, we toss the final hull into the fire and, with joined sighs, watch it catch flame. The buggy is empty, the bowl is brimful.
We eat our supper (cold biscuits, bacon, blackberry jam) and discuss tomorrow. Tomorrow the kind of work I like best begins: buying. Cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisins and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings: why, we'll need a pony to pull the buggy home.
But before these purchases can be made, there is the question of money. Neither of us has any. Except for skinflint sums persons in the house occasionally provide (a dime is considered very big money); or what we earn ourselves from various activities: holding rummage sales, selling buckets of hand-picked blackberries, jars of homemade jam and apple jelly and peach preserves, rounding up flowers for funerals and weddings. Once we won seventy-ninth prize, five dollars, in a national football contest. Not that we know a fool thing about football. It's just that we enter any contest we hear about: at the moment our hopes are centered on the fifty-thousand-dollar Grand Prize being offered to name a new brand of coffee (we suggested "A.M."; and, after some hesitation, for my friend thought it perhaps sacrilegious, the slogan "A.M.! Amen!"). To tell the truth, our only really profitable enterprise was the Fun and Freak Museum we conducted in a back-yard woodshed two summers ago. The Fun was a stereopticon with slide views of Washington and New York lent us by a relative who had been to those places (she was furious when she discovered why we'd borrowed it); the Freak was a three-legged biddy chicken hatched by one of our own hens. Everybody hereabouts wanted to see that biddy: we charged grownups a nickel, kids two cents. And took in a good twenty dollars before the museum shut down due to the decease of the main attraction.
But one way and another we do each year accumulate Christmas savings, a Fruitcake Fund. These moneys we keep hidden in an ancient bead purse under a loose board under the floor under a chamber pot under my friend's bed. The purse is seldom removed from this safe location except to make a deposit, or, as happens every Saturday, a withdrawal; for on Saturdays I am allowed ten cents to go to the picture show. My friend has never been to a picture show, nor does she intend to: "I'd rather hear you tell the story, Buddy. That way I can imagine it more. Besides, a person my age shouldn't squander their eyes. When the Lord comes, let me see him clear." In addition to never having seen a movie, she has never: eaten in a restaurant, traveled more than five miles from home, received or sent a telegram, read anything except funny papers and the Bible, worn cosmetics, cursed, wished someone harm, told a lie on purpose, let a hungry dog go hungry. Here are a few things she has done, does do: killed with a hoe the biggest rattlesnake ever seen in this county (sixteen rattles), dip snuff (secretly), tame hummingbirds (just try it) till they balance on her finger, tell ghost stories (we both believe in ghosts) so tingling they chill you in July, talk to herself, take walks in the rain, grow the prettiest japonicas in town, know the recipe for every sort of old-time Indian cure, including a magical wart-remover.
Now, with supper finished, we retire to the room in a faraway part of the house where my friend sleeps in a scrap-quilt-covered iron bed painted rose pink, her favorite color. Silently, wallowing in the pleasures of conspiracy, we take the bead purse from its secret place and spill its contents on the scrap quilt. Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man's eyes. Lovely dimes, the liveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride. And, as we sit counting pennies, it is as though we were back tabulating dead flies. Neither of us had a head for figures; we count slowly, lose track, start again. According to her calculations, we have $12.73. According to mine, exactly $13. I do hope you're wrong, Buddy. We can't mess around with thirteen. The cakes will fall. Or put somebody in the cemetery. Why, I wouldn't dream of getting out of bed on the thirteenth." This is true: she always spends thirteenths in bed. So, to be on the safe side, we subtract a penny and toss it out the window.
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A fly by imagination
And life passes so quickly...
Because literature is part of our history.
The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination. I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.
